TechCrunch Slashing Staff? Maybe Not Worth $100 Million

With 600,000+ feed
readers, we figured TechCrunch proprietor Michael Arrington ought
to be able to have a go at making a real business out of the tech
site network. Thus our prediction last week that TC would
ultimately sell for big money. And perhaps the moves
Valleywag is reporting today--pay cuts and firings at
TechCrunch subsidiary sites--are just the first Jack Welch-like
trimmings of a man who has discovered a gold mine and wants to
get serious about exploiting it.

Or, perhaps, the moves (if true) are a sign that the TechCrunch
pooh-poohers are right, and Arrington & Co. have decided that
their cash burn will ultimately incinerate them. Given the
size of TechCrunch's readership and the success of the recent
TC40 conference, we find this hard to believe. But it is a
rare company indeed that slashes salaries and staff when business
is going swimmingly.

TechCrunch's CrunchGear editor John Biggs argues to Valleywag the
"cuts" are of the former variety: The building of a dedicated
CrunchGear salesforce requiring that writers be put "on hiatus"
for a while. This explanation sounds tortured, and we assume
that, as the former editor of Gizmodo, Mr. Biggs is no stranger
to spin.

(But perhaps there's another positive spin, one that Mr. Biggs
can't avail himself of because his head is the next on the
chopping block: Perhaps TechCrunch's new senior editor, Erick
Schonfeld, has decided that the CrunchGear writers stink.)